


Pothos

by i_gaze_at_scully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Light Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-30
Updated: 2019-03-30
Packaged: 2020-01-15 04:18:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18491200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/i_gaze_at_scully/pseuds/i_gaze_at_scully
Summary: Mulder and Scully desperately try to keep an office plant alive. Season 6 angst.





	Pothos

“Hey Scully?” His voice matches his body, swiveling in his chair, somewhere else entirely. “We should get a plant. For the office.” So mundane, so unnecessary, an offhand comment, or so it would seem. She taps her pencil against her pad.

“A plant?” As though she’d not heard of them, as though the concept of growth was unknown to her.

“A plant. I’ve heard cacti keep well.” He stops his swiveling and looks at her like a man hellbent on scaling Mount Olympus. What nectar he’s after, she doesn’t know. Perhaps the ashes of their new old office inspired him to grow something, anything.

“Cacti need light,” she deadpans. 

He hums his assent. “Pothos, then.” She cocks her head, unfamiliar with the species. He takes this as a victory, she assumes, when his swiveling resumes and he turns his monitor on to scour the Internet. The plant materializes in their windowsill the very next day. Heart shaped leaves pouring over the pot, vines trailing out and about, abundant and unobtrusive at the same time. Green as all, healthy and whole, beautiful in its own right. Scully appreciates it, inanimate as it is. She’d always had a black thumb, but this plant had the audacity to spite her. It tumbled over air vents and filing cabinets, snaked along the sill and floor and into nooks and crannies. It knew no bounds.

It’s hardy, Pothos. Devil’s Ivy, it’s called. Supposedly because it thrives everywhere, usurps entire walls, makes itself known in subtle and commandeering ways. Lives on scraps, has incredible endurance. Nearly impossible to kill.

And for a while she believes it. Their pointless trips to farms and plains, their pointless questioning and documenting, their shit patrol and desk assignments away from the Pothos prove no adversary. It thrives even when they depart. It really is enduring, indestructible.

Supposedly.

And yet.

Neglect is neglect, and all things are afflicted, like it or not. Somehow, like all living things, it reacts.

It’s just a plant, she tries to remind herself, but watching the tendrils of a new leaf sour, burnt and brown, hurts something deep inside her. She watches their Pothos try desperately to reproduce, to carry on, watches the leaf make it halfway up the stalk before halting dead in its tracks and browning. New leaves depend entirely on the old, right there alongside them. It won’t die. But it won’t thrive.

Mulder watches it warily. She catches him watering it sometimes. She once catches him grooming it, trimming the excess branches to let the healthy leaves thrive. But they won’t.

It won’t  _die_.

She tries everything. She tries depriving it of water, she tries moving it away from the thinning skylight sun into the dark depths of the office. She even talks to it once, unthinking and desperate. Maybe if this one thing lives, maybe if she can prevent something from perishing, it will be worth it.

“You’re doing great,” she whispers, a lump in her throat. “A little brown is okay, everyone gets brown sometimes.” Blue, brown, human, plant, what difference does it make? Suspended in a lifeless limbo, she watches their Pothos come to an unwavering standstill.

Somehow, it will not fucking die.

When she storms out of the Gunmen’s lair, Mulder’s words bleeding through the gash he ripped in her chest, she rips a leaf right off the vine, thumbs the leather of it and grits her teeth before crushing it in her palm. If it won’t live, it should die. If it won’t live, she will kill it.

But even as she rips a branch off, even as she sobs into the crumbs of life dusting her fingertips, she knows this stupid fucking plant will outlive them all. It takes everything she has not to break the pot. She storms out and doesn’t look back.

Pothos plants are insidious, when she thinks about it. They overrun any and all space they are given and for once, she understands. She is proud and petrified at the same time, she loves and fears it, adores and reveres it. Nature does as it will do and Lord know no human has a say in its will. She knows this, but it crushes her nonetheless.

Mulder remains. He won’t leave her, absent as he is. He won’t….

She cut a leaf off the plant to propagate once. She learned that it will root in water and wanted to see it in action. She brought it home and tried to love it but watched it die like its mother and nearly cried over it. Coming home now, she takes it out of the vase, roots down to the floor with not a leaf to show for its effort, and throws it away.

Some things will thrive, and some things will die. Some things will do neither, and Dana Scully will not be one of those things.

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt credit to @wtfmulder on tumblr. Also if anyone can help a girl properly grow a healthy goddamn pothos plant, let me know, cause I'm dying over here.


End file.
